It is a well-accepted fact that the better your customer service people represent your company, the more likely your customers are to stick with you. Even when people have issues with products or services, this can be turned around to an experience that gives them a positive impression of a business when the customer service they receive is good. So then, you want to arm your customer service reps with the best training, as a given. However, after a customer service rep is fully trained and on the job, how can you make sure they continue to give knowledgeable responses?
While you can ensure productivity and compliance with your policies by monitoring your customer service calls and setting targets for your reps, this only helps you maintain standards. What can you do to actually help them give a better service?
B2E Systems
The answer often lies in the systems you give them to use for on the fly research when they are talking to customers. This can be in the form of a custom business application, or a form of intranet, but in either case is what is known as a ‘B2E’ system – meaning ‘business to employee’. While many staff might use these kinds of systems for research or to find out the latest company news, for a customer service rep it can be a tool they use on every single call. So what information can you make available to help them do the best job they can?
Up to the Minute Data
If you have a range of products and offers at any given time, you obviously can’t expect the customer service personnel to remember all of the specifics of each from their training, or keep up with the dates when new things are rolled out. While you may ask them to refer to your online catalogue, this is in effect giving them no more information than the customer can already access by themselves. What you need, then, is to manage the content shown to your customer service reps when they are on calls so that they see the information they need, including any notes on a given product left by other representatives of your company, and what they see is up to date and matches any offers or pricing the customer can see on the external website.
How Can You Maintain this Without a Lot of Hassle?
In order to keep your product information for your customer service reps up to date and in line with what customers see, while keeping it in the same ‘role based’ environment any of your staff can use, you need to use a good Contact Centre tool, for example if you’re running SAP, a system like the one offered by Weaveability.com gives you an idea of the benefits of a real-time solution. The idea is to be able to make sure changes to a product’s details, or new products, are released in real-time due to the fact they run directly from master data on both the ecommerce website your customers see, and Contact Centre system your internal staff use to support customers.
With efficient content management, you can make sure your customer service staff can trust the information their systems give them, and that they will sound efficient and knowledgeable to their callers.
